I remember the last moon, shining through a creamy atmosphere, with a
tear in the eye of Nature and her tresses dishevelled and drooping,
sliding up the sky, the glistening air, the leaves shining with dew,
pulsating upward; an atmosphere unworn, unprophaned by day. What
self-healing in Nature!

For some weeks past the roadsides and the dry and trivial fields have
been covered with the field trefoil (Trifolium
arvense), now in bloom.

A comfortable breeze blowing. Methinks I can write better in the
afternoon, for the novelty of it, if I should go abroad this morning.
My genius makes distinctions which my understanding cannot, and which
my senses do not report. If I should reverse the usual, go forth
and saunter in the fields all the forenoon,
then sit down in my chamber in the afternoon, which it is so unusual
for me to do, it would be like a new season to me, and the novelty
of it would inspire me.

The wind has fairly blown me outdoors; the elements were so lively and
active, and I so sympathized with them, that I could not sit while the
wind went by. And I am reminded that we should especially improve the
summer to live out-of-doors. When we may so easily, it behooves us to
break up this custom of sitting in the house, for it is but a custom,
and I am not sure that it has the sanction of common sense. A man no
sooner
gets up than he sits down again.

Fowls
leave their perch in the morning, and beasts their lairs, unless they
are such as go abroad only by night. The cockerel does not take up a
new perch in the barn, and he is the embodiment of health and common
sense. Is the literary man to live always or chiefly sitting in a
chamber through which nature enters by a window only? What is the use
of the summer?

You
must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being
in repose. Your mind must not perspire. True, out of doors my thought
is commonly drowned, as it were, and shrunken, pressed down by
stupendous piles of light ethereal influences, for the pressure of the
atmosphere is still fifteen pounds to a square inch. I can do little
more than preserve the equilibrium and resist the pressure of the
atmosphere.
I can only nod like the rye-heads in the breeze. I expand more surely
in my chamber, as far as expression goes, as if that pressure were
taken off; but here, outdoors is the place to store up influences.1851